Social Networking

In what has been pegged as an Australian first, Twitter this week played host to a political debate between NSW Premier, Kristina Keneally, Opposition Leader, Barry O'Farrell, and Greens MP, Lee Rhiannon, ahead of the upcoming by-election in Penrith this Saturday.

Australia's first Twitter political debate has been derided by both the public and NSW Opposition Leader, Barry O'Farrell, as a waste of time which saw key public questions go unanswered.

Twitter's persistent and disruptive service outages entered a second week, as the company scrambles to bring its site availability back to acceptable levels.

Remote staff using Facebook are seen as the biggest security and productivity threat to mobile working, according to research.

IBM CIO Mark Hennessy took on his current role in July, after 25 years of holding sales, marketing, and general management positions at Big Blue. In his "first pure-technology job," Hennessy is responsible for the technology needs of 372,000 employees worldwide, along with eight million square feet of data centers and thousands of servers and applications.

The big vendors beat down the doors of large companies to get business, but a small-company CIO gets the brush-off. He wonders how to harness the powers of the Force, and get some big-company expertise to help the little guy.

What if IT could be used to eliminate the US West Coast's notorious rolling blackouts or huge regional power outages like those experienced by the Northeast and Midwest in 2003?

OpenOffice.org's biggest foe may be Microsoft Office, but critics say the open-source organization has, from its inception, also been one of its application suite's own worst enemies -- a victim of a development culture that differs radically from the open-source norm. Observers now wonder if IBM's entry into OpenOffice.org can make the necessary changes.

Like IT executives at other services-related companies, Mitchell Dickerman, CIO at advertising agency Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos, is finding that automating his firm's business processes is paying off in cost savings and improved efficiency -- but not without some obstacles.

As chief technology officer at Visa US, which handles 35 billion online transactions annually, Scott Thompson is pummeled with pitches about new networked storage technology that promises to reduce workload and bring a higher return on investment.

It's been a bit more than two years since Ambuj Goyal launched IBM's Information on Demand strategy, an effort by the company to bring together a virtual menagerie of data management, access and analysis software under a single heading.

Don Ferguson bears what may be a unique distinction. He has the held lofty title of "Fellow," a title associated with being a distinguished technologist, at not only IBM but Microsoft as well. Last year, Ferguson left IBM, where he had participated in development of the company's WebSphere middleware platform, to come to Microsoft. He is a technical fellow in the Microsoft Office of the CTO. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill met with Ferguson at the Microsoft SOA and Business Process in Washington this week to talk about Microsoft, including the company's new Oslo modeling and services project, and IBM.

IBM has been on an acquisition spree, having recently snapped up DataMirror, a data management vendor in Markam, Ontario; Princeton Softech, a data archiving company in Princeton, New Jersey; and Watchfire, a Web application security provider in Waltham, Massachusetts. Computerworld US' Thomas Hoffman talked with Deborah Magid, director of software strategy at IBM's Venture Capital Group in Menlo Park, California, about the company's strategy.

IBM coined the term autonomic computing in 2001 and since then has been beating the automation drum across its software and hardware product lines. The premise of a self-healing, self-protecting, self-optimizing and self-managing data centre caused some industry watchers to scoff, but Big Blue stuck to its plans and now has about 450 autonomic features shipping in 70 or so IBM products. Now with virtualization, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and other innovative technologies increasing complexity across corporate data centres, IBM says automation is needed more than ever. Ric Telford, vice president of autonomic computing at IBM, recently talked with Denise Dubie to learn more about the state of the company's autonomic initiative.

I started life in IT decades ago as a sales guy for a mainframe leasing firm attached to Greyhound --yes, the bus company. Greyhound Leasing and Financial actually wrote the first lease on an IBM mainframe, thereby creating a niche industry that included the lease and resale of new and used IBM mainframe hardware.

January is a good time to hold a user conference, because there's not a lot of competition for anyone's attention. At any other time of year you might not even notice how Lotus is wilting.

In late October, a buddy from my MacWeek days e-mailed me with this half-joking dig: "Apple's worth more than IBM. The Mac wins!!"

While there wasn't anything ground-breaking about IBM's Blue Cloud announcement in Shanghai last Friday it was still significant.

Multicore technology pays off for IBM with its 326m server. Cramming as many dual-core Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processors into the smallest space possible, the eServer 326m provides enormous amounts of CPU muscle.

IBM continues to produce new servers that deliver greater value. The new xSeries 365 is clearly the next step in IBM's strategy, offering more performance, convenience, and scalability in a smaller package than its predecessor. The result is a server that can meet nearly any imaginable departmental need and fit well into many enterprise applications that once required more expensive servers and more resources to operate.

With the proliferation of electronic documents and the archival pressures that various industry regulations have been exerting on companies, enterprise search has become an important IT requirement during the past few years. Many search solutions -- including search appliances and more-robust, federated search engines, such as those from IBM and Verity -- have come to market recently to meet the demand. Specialty products such as Vivisimo Velcocity fill additional niches.

Sometimes, size does matter. Take servers. Some applications - Web hosting, file/print, domain control, firewalls - don't require a huge amount of horsepower or the utmost in high-availability hardware because it's easy to build clusters.